The Real Revolution of Vertical Drama Is Happening Behind the Camera

9 min readJust now--Attention goes to the format, the origin and the stock plots. What is likely to change the industry sits behind them.Late-night television has already parodied vertical drama. In July 2026, the American network NBC’s The Tonight Show released Who Billionaire?

Me Billionaire., a 10-episode spoof of the secret-billionaire plot with Jimmy Fallon and John Stamos, and the trade magazine Hollywood Reporter reported that Comedy Central is preparing a Daily Show microdrama, the industry’s other word for the format, built on the same conventions. What gets recognised is its surface: a vertical frame, episodes of 1 to 2 minutes, dozens to a series, filmed upright for a phone, and billionaires, werewolves and love triangles.I have spent 25 years in television and online video, including as technical director of Afrostream, a streaming service for African content. In 2026 I tried to make a vertical drama with artificial intelligence (AI) tools and published both attempts in Streaming Radar, my newsletter on the economics of streaming. In March, two days and about $120 produced 90 seconds about cats, which I called catastrophic. In October, 9 episodes of Vertical What?, a series about vertical drama itself, took two weeks.That attention is misplaced. What may change the audiovisual industry is behind the screen: a factory for intellectual property (IP), decisions driven by analysis rather than by a single executive, and a very fast integration of AI. The format could disappear and the factory remain.What gets looked atThe parody works because the conventions can be read in a second: an upright frame, a cliffhanger at the end of every episode, a billionaire, a werewolf. A format that can be caricatured in one sentence tends to be judged from the caricature.Some judgments go further than the conventions. In January 2026, A.V. Club, the American culture site, wrote that the format had been popularised by “a handful of Chinese-backed American corporations, producing content that is utterly alien in composition and laughably amateurish in execution, in pursuit of maximum profit.” The same piece makes points that can be checked against the shows: the apps hide the price behind coins, and a viewer can easily spend “$20 or $30 to watch 90 minutes”. The sentence judges ownership and execution together.Several traits of the format, romance above all, sit in territory that critics have often ranked low. Reading the Romance, Janice Radway’s study of romance readers published in 1984, set out, in its publisher’s words, to challenge “popular (and often demeaning) myths” about why the genre is read. Whether that history colours the way vertical drama is received is a hypothesis. The audience figures are more mixed. A 2024 white paper from DataEye, a Chinese analytics firm that tracks micro-drama releases and advertising, counts male and female micro-drama users at 50% each in China, and its 2025 report estimates women at 52%, with one app, Hongguo, a free service from ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, at 68%.A show can deserve every criticism it gets and still belong to a system that matters. Attention fixed on the conventions, the origin and the audience leaves that system out of view, starting with the shoot.The shoot is not the changeTelevision has shot fast for as long as it has had a schedule.

In 2014, Les Echos, the French business daily, visited the set of Plus belle la vie, a French daily soap, and counted more than 20 minutes of finished screen time shot per day, on 260 working days a year for 260 broadcasts.